SailGP Season 5: New broadcasters, new requirements

By
Friday, November 22, 2024 - 10:34
Print This Story

The Germany SailGP team in action ahead of the SailGP Season 4 Grand Final in San Francisco (Photo: Ricardo Pinto for SailGP)

SailGP has added a raft of new broadcast partners for the 2025 season, including TNT Sports as the exclusive broadcaster for the UK and Ireland and a new multi-season partnership with German broadcaster ZDF.

The deal with ZDF, which was announced last week (15 November), will significantly expand the league’s reach in Germany. ZDF will broadcast all SailGP events and create bespoke highlights to be shared across its various channels and platforms.

The Germany SailGP Team – which includes Sebastian Vettel among the Thomas Riedel-led ownership group – will get to race in a home event for the first time following the inclusion of SailGP’s first-ever event in Germany taking place in Sassnitz, Rugen in August, with ZDF to air live linear coverage of the race.

For viewers in the UK and Ireland, TNT Sports will provide live coverage of all events in the 2025 Season on its TV channels and its streaming platform discovery+. In Spain, a deal with Movistar Plus+ will see live racing on Deportes 3 on the M+ platform. In addition, a renewed deal with Sky Italia will continue the relationship with the broadcaster, which is described as a longstanding partner of the racing series.

SailGP has also renewed partnerships with Foxtel Group and SBS in Australia for the 2025 season, while GloboTV will be the official broadcast partner in Brazil, covering all events in the 2025 season on Sportv, including live coverage of the Enel Rio Sail Grand Prix in May when Rio de Janeiro hosts the first-ever Brazilian SailGP event.

To help serve more broadcasters, SailGP is adding an additional gallery to its remote production setup in Ealing, west London.

Chris Carpenter, SailGP executive producer, at Ealing Broadcast Centre in London

SailGP executive producer Chris Carpenter says that the extra gallery has been added in part to provide editorialised English language content. He adds: “We’re adding in a secondary gallery so that we can basically do the opposite of a world feed; I’m going to produce the English-language gallery, which we used to refer to as the world feed, and then the new, secondary gallery is going to take out some of those editorial English language elements and make it more world feed-like.

“It’s kind of the reverse of how some big productions are done, but it made sense for us because most broadcasters take our English language feed, albeit with a different language, some different graphics or their own commentary teams.

“It’s going to probably start quite simple, but I can see over time we might build it into more of a traditional world feed, and then have additional unilaterals which can layer on top, whether it’s Spanish, French, or even a full-blown English language production.”

The addition of some new broadcasters has also required the creation of an additional, ‘brand free’ feed.

To help viewers understand the sport, SailGP’s Emmy Award-winning broadcast graphic package LiveLine projects augmented boundaries onto the racecourse. These can also be used to display logos from SailGP’s commercial partners.

SailGP director of LiveLine Tom Peel explains. He says: “Some broadcasters aren’t allowed to show the virtual branding and advertising that happens in LiveLine so we have to paralyse some of our outputs to create a commercial and a non-commercial feed. It adds a lot more complexity, so we’re really pushing the envelope of our EVS systems. We’re working with EVS to deliver commercial and non-commercial branded replays into different galleries, into different outputs and at the same time. There’s some quite complex stuff under the hood that’s going on to enable some of these new broadcast deals.”

In addition, SailGP has launched a cloud-based content platform, the SailGP Port, via the Reuters Imagen platform. It will allow rights-holding broadcasters’ teams and sponsors to download content, with access controlled according to their permissions.

Says Carpenter: “From a content perspective, more teams, especially ones that are privately owned (SailGP has sold most of the teams to private owners), with their own sponsors and partners – they all need video content so there is a knock-on effect as to how we then have to help as Sail GP productions because we have all the content.

The launch of SailGP Port will allow broadcasters to build their own shows around the world feed output, says Carpenter.

Read more:

 

Subscribe and Get SVG Europe Newsletters